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Tea Recommendations

I am a huge lover of tea. I make myself a mug every single morning, and often have another cup in the afternoon if I’m reading or working on homework. It’s my biggest complaint about college dining halls: all too often they run out of hot water in the morning or they don’t have a good selection of tea, and I can’t enjoy my breakfast properly.

Since nothing goes together quite like a hot cup of tea and a good book, and I’m primarily a book blog, I thought I would look at a few teas I’ve tried recently, and offer my opinion on them.

Choice Organic Decaf English Breakfast Tea

They have this tea in the dining hall at my college, so I’ve tried it a few times. It’s not my favorite black tea, I think I like caffeinated Lipton better, because that’s my usual go-to in college, but it does the job. It’s slightly more bitter than the Lipton variety, but overall not too bad, and I can still drink it without the need for cream or sugar (that’s also partly because the flavor is just slightly less strong than the Lipton tea, even if it is more bitter). Overall, I really like this variety, especially for a tea in a college dining hall.

Tazo Vanilla Caramel Chai Tea

I bought this tea a couple weeks ago, and was ultimately disappointed by it. I love a good chai tea, and I love vanilla caramel as a flavoring in coffee, so I was hoping this would be a good blend of those two. Ultimately, the effect was underwhelming. I felt like I could barely taste the chai flavoring or the vanilla caramel flavoring, and when I did taste each, they weren’t blended together smoothly. I’d only be able to taste them separately, which was a bit strange, and both flavors were so weak, I was tasting mostly hot water half the time (even when I tried putting two tea bags in to soak). While it didn’t necessarily taste bad, the three times I tried this tea, I couldn’t finish my cup, because the hot water taste and weird blend of flavors just got to be too much by the end. The best part about this tea was its smell: when you open a box or just smell one of the tea bags, there is a lovely mix of smells from the spices in the chai, the vanilla, and the caramel.

Twinnings Green Tea

This has been my go-to tea every morning since I got home from college. It’s one of the more bitter flavored green teas I’ve tried, but nevertheless, once I got used to it, I fell in love with it. It goes really well with a sweeter breakfast, like cereal, but it’s perfect to drink on its own too. If you’re not a fan of bitter tea, or if you’ve never tried green tea, I might avoid this variety to begin with; but if you’ve had green tea before and liked it, I’d say this is a pretty safe bet.

Anyway, I decided I’d stick with only three teas today, but I might do a post like this again in the future! It won’t become a regular thing, because I don’t try that many varieties of tea that often, but I’ve definitely tried more than three, so I’ll create one or two similar posts in the future when I have a chance to ponder the flavors of some other varieties (it is surprisingly difficult to describe taste). In the meantime, if you have tea recommendations, I am always open to hearing them!